The Prado Finds in El Greco the Key to Picasso’s Cubism

Fifty years after Picasso’s death, two of Spain’s greats go mano a mano.

G reetings from Madrid. I haven’t been to Spain in a couple of years, but the big art story here — the premiere of the Royal Collection Gallery — hasn’t been covered much in the U.S., though it’s the country’s grandest new museum project since the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum opened in 1999. The gallery — actually a freestanding, purpose-built museum — displays the very best things in the royal collection.

The Royal Palace, next to the new building, isn’t a museum catering to the public, as sumptuous as it is. It caters to the king and his court. It’s a stage set for ceremonies. And, with 3,418 rooms, it’s the biggest palace in Europe and makes Buckingham Palace look like a starter home in Levittown. The palace is still the place to go for sublime ceiling paintings by Tiepolo and Corrado Giaquinto, and for an arms and armor collection second to none.

The gallery’s simply splendid. I’ll write about it next week. For today, I’ll continue my look at exhibitions commemorating the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death. Picasso, El Greco, and Analytical Cubism is unusual for the Prado. Picasso’s realm is the Reina Sofía, Spain’s anchor contemporary-art museum. There, Picasso’s Guernica is displayed as well as paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings, and ceramics from every decade in his long career.

Aside from Toledo, El Greco’s hometown where it’s easy to trip over his work, the Prado is the place to go, especially for El Greco’s late work. The show is also among the 50 or so Picasso exhibitions officially sanctioned by Picasso’s heirs and the Musée Picasso in Paris. Picasso worshipped the art of El Greco (1541–1614), but this is thought to show most in his Blue Period, melancholic pictures between 1901 and 1904. Until now, Picasso’s cool, dissective Cubist work from 1909 to around 1913 seemed very far from El Greco’s stretched, writhing saints and electric color.

It’s a one-room exhibition with enough firepower, art-wise, to sink The Maine. Four primo Picassos are there: The Mandolin Player from the Beyeler Foundation, The Accordionist from the Guggenheim, The Clarinetist from the Thyssen, and The Aficionado from the Kunstmuseum Basel, all from 1911 and 1912. Each is paired with one of El Greco’s three-quarter-length imaginary portraits of saints. The Picassos are 51-by-37 inches and are, for Picasso, very vertical. The El Greco saint portraits of Simon, Bartholomew, John the Evangelist, and Paul are a bit smaller. On the wall opposite the pairings are four soaring El Grecos, the tallest 137-by-57 inches, all from the Prado.

It’s safe to say that saying “no” to the Prado is hard to do. It’s got Met-caliber borrowing power, which is to say it gets what it wants. What the Prado already has is a bounty of late, wild El Grecos from the 1590s to around 1610.

I didn’t know what to make of so jarring a juxtaposition.

Picasso didn’t have a stage mother, but he did indeed have a stage father, who was a painter, a teacher at the local art school in Málaga, and a curator of the city’s modest art museum. When Papa saw that he had a genius for a son, he made it his job to mentor him. “You are going entirely in the wrong direction,” he told Pablo when he learned he was copying El Greco’s work at the Prado and in Toledo.

At that point, El Greco wasn’t famous. Few Americans knew his work, and, in Spain, artists and scholars knew him as an accomplished though regional and eccentric artist. Some thought he had serious vision problems, which explained his twisting, attenuated figures. Some felt his troubled vision was in his idiosyncratic, fundamentalist Catholic faith. He envisioned saints as, in life, halfway to heaven, which explained why they looked like phantoms. El Greco was a bad role model in either sense, Picasso’s father believed.

El Greco’s Baptism of Jesus, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Pentecost were painted between 1597 and 1600 not for a patron in Toledo but for a seminary chapel in Madrid. When the seminary was secularized into an elite school, the art went to the Prado, then transitioning from a royal collection to a state-owned, public museum. They’re the most mystical and bizarre of El Greco’s late work.

When El Greco arrived in Toledo around 1576, he was an accomplished Rome Mannerist. After that, he never left Spain and rarely left Toledo. A good case can be made, and has been made, that he stuck with a core Mannerist formula and simply pushed it to an extreme over many years until he reached his work from the late 1590s. Into the first decade of the next century, he pushed it even more.

The late, vertical pictures show bodies that are ethereal, as if they don’t really belong to their human inhabitants anymore. Flat, unrealistic space also changes the story line, in El Greco compounding the link between the heavens and our world, and in Picasso underscoring his Cubist disembodiment.

The show’s interpretation is minimal. In Analytical Cubism, Picasso broke down the form into geometric units, almost fragments, that, together, suggest, say, a musician. Picasso uses cross-hatching to reassemble the parts into a whole that looks like a human figure. At the same time, he flattens space. After this explanation of Analytical Cubism in the introductory panel, we’re left on our own.

Does El Greco do this? Well, he does and he doesn’t. Francisco Pacheco was Velázquez’s teacher and, later, his father-in-law and the author of the most influential biography and survey of late-16th- and early-17th-century Spanish painters. He discussed El Greco’s “brutal brushwork,” which sometimes looked like he hacked away at paint.

El Greco’s paint strokes, usually big, start on the edges with, say, a saturated red, and then, as he moves toward the center of the stroke, he adds more white so the brushstroke seems to make a peak. Before settling in Toledo, El Greco spent a few years in Venice, where he admired and possibly worked for Tintoretto, who applied paint like this, though not in as extreme a manner as El Greco would.

Picasso saw this and adapted it, though his Synthetic Cubist work in the Prado exhibition is more monochromatic. These are earth colors, mostly brown, green, and gray. El Greco’s colors are vibrant, even neon, with lots of citrus. And in The Mandolin Player and the other Picassos, forms seem to come directly from Cézanne, whose figures are made from painterly building-block shapes. I’d call El Greco a slasher. Picasso’s the more measured, calculating painter.

I’ve always looked at Synthetic Cubism as X-ray art. Picasso takes the form apart in fragments and reassembles it so we analyze the structure of it. X-ray technology was very new. Wilhelm Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for discovering what were called “bone portraits.”

Yes, we can say that El Greco intuited and depicted the soul beneath the flesh of his figures. “Never borrow, only steal,” Picasso said of his relationship to Old Masters. Sometimes he took a pose, but that’s hardly unusual. Often, what Picasso got was inspiration, not only on surface appearance but in the spirit of an artist.

It’s a very good exhibition. I wish the labels had more flesh, but I saw some very great things. El Greco’s portraits of saints are from the Museo del Greco in Toledo. El Greco is the gift that keeps on giving. Picasso’s father aside, El Greco was rediscovered by young, cutting-edge artists including Picasso and also by Sargent, not cutting-edge but deeply informed about Spanish culture and certainly edgy at times. The exhibition made me look and think. It didn’t seem far-fetched to me, though so many scholars and critics have plowed Terra Picasso. It’s hard to find a new idea.

Two quibbles. I hate a white wall color for Old Master paintings, but that’s what we have. Curators believe that this helps make an artist like El Greco seem modern since white walls are the default color for modern art. It doesn’t. It can make Old Masters look like black holes. El Greco can bear it, but even the Picassos would look better against, say, a deep red. They’d look more Spanish. Second, the catalogue is in Spanish only. A few years ago, I reviewed the Prado’s fantastic retrospective of the work of Mariano Fortuny. The catalogue, the definitive book on this superb artist, is only in Spanish. I can read Spanish, but few art historians can unless they’re Spanish themselves or specialize in Spanish art.

Fortuny, who died in 1874, was the last Spanish artist before Picasso who was internationally famous. I don’t like to seem a snob but unless a scholarly catalogue has an English edition, it won’t penetrate the art-history blob. That’s simply reality.

My biggest problem — not a quibble — with the show is Georges Braque (1882–1963). Both Picasso and Braque pioneered Cubism together, “lashed together on a mountain,” as Braque said. In their Analytical Cubist work, it’s hard to distinguish between them. Braque, as far as I know, had nada interest in El Greco during this time.

After three or so hours at the Prado, I went to the Reina Sofia, Madrid’s museum of modern and contemporary art, to see Guernica, Picasso’s 25-by-11 foot opus from 1937, depicting the notorious German air raid of the old provincial capital of Biscay in the Basque Country. Guernica was a Republican redoubt, as was much of the Basque Country and especially nearby Bilbao. Extensively reported on by American, British, and French newspapers, the bombing — with advanced incendiary bombs — was incendiary in every sense of the word.

Guernica has most of Picasso’s 1930s-era bells and whistles. It’s got bulls, horses, and contorted women and children formed by geometric shapes. The Reina Sofia is heavy on Picassos, so the picture has plenty of context. I think Picasso welcomed the chance to paint his age’s version of Goya’s Second of May, 1808, and Third of May, 1808, both done during the Peninsular War (1807–14), Spain’s last mass bloodbath before its civil war in the 1930s. Goya’s Disasters of War etchings are far gorier than Guernica and get to what war looks like.

Guernica is huge. Though not as big as a movie screen, it alludes to movies, especially to newsreels. Last week I wrote about Pontormo’s three grisaille paintings from the 1510s, shown at the art museum at Bowdoin College in Maine. Aesthetics in, say, 1515 and 1937 are apples and oranges. Pontormo painted in gray to evoke the ghosts of the past. Picasso used it for a documentary, newsreel, “you are there” look. Seen today, 86 years on, Guernica has the otherworldly look of the Pontormos.

Otherworldly, yes, but antique, or even antiquated? I’ve seen Guernica a half dozen times over the years. Picasso painted it to promote Republican Spain at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. So, it’s a partisan picture. He toured it as a fundraiser for the cause. It looks like a tribute to Poussin’s Abduction of the Sabine Women, from 1633.

Franco, through back channels, tried to persuade Picasso to show Guernica in Spain. He knew it would get there sooner or later, and sooner meant that the government could control its impact. Or it might have been an old man’s whim. He might have been curious about its reception. And Franco wasn’t blinkered. For all his succession planning, he saw catharsis, change, and reconciliation on the horizon. He was a wily old devil.

In any event, Picasso declined. He last visited Spain in 1934. After the Spanish Civil War ended, with Franco and the Falangists the winners, Picasso insisted he wouldn’t return until the country was a republic, and neither would Guernica. Picasso died in 1973, and Franco died two years later. By the late 1970s, Spain transitioned to a constitutional monarchy led by King Juan Carlos, who had been groomed as a young prince by Franco to succeed him as head of state. MoMA, at first, wouldn’t relinquish the picture, then its biggest draw, insisting that a constitutional monarchy wasn’t a republic. Finally, in 1981, they coughed it up, and off to Spain it went.

Picasso wanted Guernica to go to the Prado and not only to burnish his renown. He was, aesthetically, omnivorous and spent the last 40 years of his life in France, without a single visit to Spain. That said, the Spanish Old Masters were his foundation.

The dead Picasso didn’t get the last word. I saw Guernica in the ’80s in Madrid, displayed in the Casón del Buen Retiro, the Prado’s annex. As a subject, the Spanish Civil War was still a hot potato frittata. The guards in the gallery carried machine guns. Only a few years earlier, army renegades had tried to overthrow Spain’s elected government.

In 1995, the thing went to the Reina Sofia, Spain’s then-new contemporary-art museum. In those days, Spain’s museums were thoroughly political, with directors picked by the government of the day for their malleability rather than their art-history chops. The move made sense since so much of Picasso’s work is at the Reina Sofia, giving Guernica context. For the museum, it’s still a destination-maker, but it was even more so when it first opened. And, off and on during Guernica’s first few years there, the guards were armed with machine guns.

I wonder how Picasso would feel about Guernica’s now living in a home named for a Bourbon queen, and the consort of Franco’s hand-picked king at that.